Hungarian Conservative

‘You have to have different levels of political engagement. You have to win at different levels, the intellectual level, the battle of ideas level, you’ve got to win at this  level. And then you’ve got the next level down, that you’ve got to win on policy, and win the debate politically, and then politicians translate these ideas into their own language and then they have to be able to convey that message to the voters. These are two different roles, but they are also overlapping. Like Edmund Burke, one of the greatest conservative thinkers, was also an active politician.’

‘The systematic method Tóth uses really contributes to our understanding of ideology and ideological thinking. To mention a few substantial arguments that are derived from the plot of Darkness at Noon: ideological thinking is not necessarily concerned with objective reality; it naturally leads to radicalism; and—somewhat paradoxically—seems to replace its ideological nature with neo-Machiavellian pragmatism when the question of power politics emerges.’

‘The phenomenon of the conservative revolution was partly a consequence of the collapse of the German state (formed in the 19th century by Bismarckian ‘state-building) after the First World War, and was born out of its internal and external crisis, its defeat in the war. In the broader context of ideological and political history, however, the conservative revolution, albeit a cataclysmic one, cannot be seen as the consequence of a single political event.’

One simply cannot put something as complexly different as the Chinese intellectual field onto either the American left–right axis or the West-European ideological taxonomy. Ultimately, the Chinese field is a different world, albeit one that bears affinities with, and shows much interest in, us Western conservatives.

Kissinger served as US Secretary of State under Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford between 1973 and 1977. In 1973, he won the Nobel Peace Prize. Known for his realist approach to foreign policy, he had considerable impact on many major world events during his century in this world.

‘The term “liberal” was undoubtedly originally associated with the aristocratic spirit of freedom and generosity (in Latin: liberalitas), which, recognizing a natural hierarchy among individual beings, finds diversity welcome and does not desire to make things equal in all circumstances. Since many of the theoreticians of liberalism did not take this principle into account, it can be derived that most liberals strongly oppose the principle of authority.’

According to Thomas Molnar, intellectualism is only a brief flash between the religious and technological society. More dangerous than its waning light is its ‘thunder’, i.e. the unspoken problem of the Century, which is revealed unmistakably only after the lightning.